Wherever Seeds May Fall (First Contact)

by Peter Cawdron

  Once she’s inside the West Wing, she rushes to the security desk. Usually, they’d sign her in, but the panicked look on her face signals her intent. The officer stationed there is already on the phone. Out of breath and flustered, Kath asks to speak to the President.

  “Dr. McKenzie?” Jim McGuire says, rushing out of his office. “Is everything all right?”

  “No, it’s not,” she says, pushing past a guard to get to him. McGuire signals with a slight flick of his hand, letting the guard know it’s okay.

  “Where’s the President?”

  “Umm, she’s in the Oval Office. Nolan’s in there with her. They’re meeting with leaders from NATO.”

  “We need to get in there.”

  “We?” McGuire says, holding out his hands, wanting her to slow down. “What’s going on, Kath?”

  Tears well up in her eyes. Her hands are trembling, but not from the cold.

  “We have to do something or millions of people are going to die.”

  McGuire doesn’t respond. He doesn’t ask how or why. He simply nods, trusting her judgment and taking her by the arm as he leads her down the corridor.

  “Wait here,” he says, leaving her standing in the reception area outside the Oval Office. Kath fidgets. Nerves get the better of her.

  McGuire opens the door to the Oval Office like a burglar sneaking into a mansion. From within, voices fall silent.

  “I’m sorry, Madam President,” is all Kath catches as the door is closed quietly behind him.

  Kath needs to pee. Mentally, she knows she doesn’t, but physically her body is in panic mode. Anxiety tells her to get herself the hell out of there. She squirms. To distract herself, Kath addresses the President’s personal secretary.

  “Can I use your pencil?”

  “Sure.”

  Kath leans forward on the edge of the desk. She scribbles numbers on the back of her printouts, running a variety of calculations through her head and onto the page. Kath keeps herself busy, wanting the sums to talk to her. Quick sketches of orbital paths, dates, and velocities confirm her thinking.

  Damn it!

  Kath knows she should have seen this coming.

  Oval Office

  The curved door to the Oval Office opens.

  Kath stands to attention, clutching her laptop and papers to her chest.

  Several generals walk out, resplendent in their dress uniforms. Medals adorn their chests. Kath lowers her eyes, staring at her shoes as they walk past. As much as she’d like to blend in with the wallpaper, she’s conspicuous.

  “—will reschedule for tomorrow,” floats through the air from some nameless analyst.

  Damn, she needs to pee. Too late. McGuire stands in the doorway, beckoning to her.

  President Aston is fuming. She’s standing behind the Resolute Desk, flanked by the US and Presidential flags. She has her hands on her hips, pulling her jacket wide.

  “What the hell, Kath?” she says. “What is so goddamn important it can’t wait half an hour?”

  Kath has barely cleared the door and her anxiety is peaking. She’s never been in the Oval Office. Everything is intimidating. Polished wooden floors run around a thick shag-pile carpet. Her eyes glance down, catching a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. woven into the fabric.

  …bends toward justice…

  She can’t bring herself to step there. Kath breaks her stride and steps over onto the fawn carpet. Even that feels wrong. It’s not just clean—it’s pristine.

  There are no corners in the office. Being oval, that’s hardly a surprise, but the effect is such that it feels as though there’s no sense of direction. There’s nowhere to hide.

  Nolan stands to one side in his dress uniform. He looks distinctly unimpressed with her.

  “Those were our allies,” he says. “Our only allies outside of North America.”

  The President nods in agreement.

  McGuire closes the door behind Kath, remaining in the room with them. The silence screams. They’re waiting for her to respond.

  “Ah,” she says, holding out her laptop and crumpled papers as though they were proof. “It’s not stopping.”

  “What?” the President says, twisting her head sideways.

  “An̆duru. It’s not going to stop.”

  That changes the mood in the room. The President lowers herself into her chair. She has her hands out flat on the polished wood, with her fingers splayed. She’s trying to comprehend not only what Kath’s saying but the broader implications.

  “Go on.”

  Kath swallows. She steps forward, resting her laptop on the edge of the Resolute desk as she sorts through her printouts.

  “We thought it was. We assumed it was, but it’s not.”

  “Wait a minute,” Nolan says. “Did I miss something? An̆duru’s coming here, right? To Earth. Why wouldn’t it stop?”

  “Orbital mechanics,” Kath replies, struggling with how to articulate her reasoning. Her thinking is sluggish. She feels as though she just bit into an ice cream and came away with brain-freeze. Nothing is firing. Goddamn it. She wants to be better. She struggles to describe what she knows in an eloquent, simple, clear, and concise manner.

  “You’ve all seen the movies. Spaceships go racing around with their engines blazing, right? Bright lights as rockets flare. Only, that’s all wrong. Spaceflight is governed by the conservation of momentum. Give something a push and it’s like you’re pushing a puck across the ice. It just keeps going. Stopping takes as much energy as it does to get started.”

  “So?” Nolan says.

  “So they’re coming in fast. Way too fast. At two hundred kilometers a second. They should be slowing by now. They need to lose roughly 90% of their speed in two days.”

  The President says, “And you think that’s not going to happen?”

  “With every passing moment, it becomes more unlikely.”

  “I don’t understand,” Nolan says. “So they’re not coming here? They’re just going to whizz by?”

  “Not quite,” Kath says, drawing concentric circles on the back of a printout. “If you want to get to China, you fly west across the Pacific, right? But you can also fly east, out across Europe and Asia.”

  “I don’t follow,” the President says. From the stress in her voice, it’s clear Kath is losing her.

  “The point is, there are many ways to get somewhere depending on what’s important to you.”

  “So what’s important to them?” McGuire asks.

  “That’s the question,” Kath replies, tapping the drawing she’s made. “Best we understand it, An̆duru is running on empty. It’s come so far it’s flying on the smell of an oily rag. When it encountered Saturn, it lost 130 km/s without using any fuel. When it encountered Jupiter, it shed exactly the same amount again. 130 km/s. But it’s still traveling at 200 km/s, and there are no more gas giants.”

  Finally, Nolan gets it. “It needs at least two more planets to slow down.”

  “Yes,” Kath says, pointing at him with the pencil. “Earth and Venus.”

  “Venus?” the President asks, surprised by the notion.

  “It’s going to Venus?” McGuire asks, confused. “How did you figure this out?”

  “I didn’t. The Chinese did.”

  The President and McGuire exchange looks.

  “And you trust them?” Nolan asks.

  “I trust the science.”

  The President doesn’t look convinced.

  “An̆duru is not slowing down.” Kath draws on her diagram. “This is the only conclusion that makes any sense. An̆duru has to slow down to make contact with us. Without firing its engines, it needs to slingshot around Venus and come back to Earth a second time. By then, it’ll have shed 90% of its current speed without using any fuel.

  “We’ve done this ourselves. When we launched New Horizons, we sent it in the wrong direction. On purpose. Instead of sending it out of the solar system, we fired it in toward Venus. It swung around, gaining speed befor
e racing back past us and out toward Pluto. When it comes to An̆duru, it’s the reverse. It’ll look something like this…”

  “Okay,” the President says, shrugging her shoulders. “So this is like a hockey player looping around behind the goal to come to a stop.”

  “Yes,” Kath says. “Precisely.”

  “That’s not so bad,” the President says. “So they fly by us, cut the corner at Venus, and then come back slower. I don’t see the problem.”

  Kath says, “They need both planets to slow down. Earth and Venus. Passing through our atmosphere will release energy on par with a nuclear explosion.”

  “Oh, that’s bad,” McGuire says.

  “That’s very bad,” the President says.

  Nolan asks, “When, where and how big?”

  “Ah,” Kath says, sorting through her print outs and pulling one of them to the front. She taps it, saying, “In two days. It’ll enter the atmosphere just after midnight, somewhere near Florida. From there, it’ll pass over the Gulf and out over Mexico. Probably exiting near the Baja Peninsula.”

  “And the size of the explosion?” the President asks.

  “We’re talking hundreds of megatons spread across that entire region.”

  “Fuck.”

  Kath’s not sure if that was McGuire or Nolan, but the President is silent.

  The President leans forward, propping her elbows on the desk and burying her face in her hands. No one speaks. After a few seconds, she taps her nails on the wood. It’s as though her mind is rebooting, finding new resolve.

  “Talk to me,” the President says, sitting upright and focusing. “What can we do?”

  “Can we take it out before then?” McGuire asks.

  “No,” Nolan says. “At that size and speed, even if we could hit it, we’d still be hit with the debris. Think buckshot instead of a shotgun slug.”

  “It’ll be a high altitude pass,” Kath says, followed closely by, “I hope.”

  “You’re going to have to explain that one,” McGuire says.

  “When An̆duru reached Jupiter, it dived to a depth of a hundred and twenty kilometers. Even that barely touched the troposphere. Looking at the imagery, it’s easy to think An̆duru stirred up the clouds on Jupiter, but it never came within fifty kilometers of them. What we saw was its wake kicking up the clouds well after it had already gone. An̆duru barely grazed the gas giant.”

  “Well, that’s good, right?” McGuire says. “If it barely touched Jupiter, perhaps it’ll barely touch Earth.”

  The President asks, “If that was Earth, what altitude would it equate to?”

  “In terms of the equivalent atmospheric pressure?” Kath says, feeling her palms go sweaty. “Sea level.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah, but Venus is a better target,” Kath says, scrambling for good news. “Thick, dense atmosphere. More cushioning. We’re hoping that means they won’t have to lose too much velocity here. And—”

  “And what?” McGuire asks.

  Kath’s madly trying to collect her thoughts. “They know there’s life down here.”

  The President points at her, saying, “So you think they’ll factor that in?”

  “I hope so. If I was them, I’d favor Venus over Earth for aerobraking.”

  “But you’re not,” the President says. “I need to know what they would do.”

  “They’ll want to lose roughly fifty to sixty kilometers per second to make Venus, if not more.”

  “And that’s a lot?”

  “Given their size, that’s a lot.”

  Nolan says, “And that’s bad?”

  “Yes. Because there are millions of people along the flight path. We’ve got to evacuate them. An̆duru will reach its deepest point somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico. We’re going to have to evacuate coastal towns.”

  “And Mexico?” the President asks.

  “And the Bahamas. And Cuba. Puerto Rico. Haiti. All of them.”

  “In two days?”

  “Not possible,” McGuire says. “We’d need weeks—months to pull that off.”

  The President says, “Okay, so we treat this like a hurricane. Get out if you can. Otherwise, shelter in place.”

  Kath has her doubts about that strategy, but what else can they do?

  “I’m going to have to get the State Department on this,” McGuire says. “Get them talking to their counterparts in these countries.”

  “With only two days, there’s no time for diplomacy,” the President says. “We need to make sure everyone’s on the same page. Get the word out through State, but I want a broadcast camera in here. We’ll tell everyone at once. We need to mobilize and damn quick.”

  “On it,” McGuire says, running for the door. Kath turns to follow him.

  “Oh, no,” the President says, pointing at Kath. “You! You’re not going anywhere.”

  Kath is horrified.

  The President adds, “I need the two of you to stay here and help craft the exact wording of this speech.”

  “Ah.”

  As if she can read Kath’s mind, the President goes on to say, “You’ll find a bathroom behind that door. There’s tea and coffee over there. Please, take a seat.”

  Kath and Nolan sit on the couches opposite the Resolute Desk. The cushions are stiff and unyielding. It’s as though no one has ever sat on them. The very act seems sacrilege. The President disappears through a side door. The two of them stare at each other. They look lost.

  “I might,” Kath says, pointing toward the bathroom. Nolan just nods.

  When she returns, the President is seated behind the desk. An assistant applies makeup. Nolan’s still on the couch, but he’s talking to Janice Copeland, the President’s speechwriter. McGuire works with a couple of technicians to set up a broadcast camera complete with a teleprompter.

  Kath grabs her laptop, trying to be discreet as she logs back into the conversation with her science team. Jacinta has tracked down the impact of high altitude nuclear explosions.

  You guys still there?

  Kath McKenzie, NASA

  Yep. You talking to the Big P?

  Jessie Chambers, Astronomical League

  In the Oval Office.

  Kath McKenzie, NASA

  Showoff.

  Sara Hendi, JPL

  Pics or it didn’t happen.

  Jessie Chambers, Astronomical League

  Come on, Kath. Take a selfie by the desk.

  Prof Alvarez, ESA

  This is really NOT the time.

  Kath McKenzie, NASA

  Okay.

  Fair enough.

  I’ve got an update for you on the spin of An̆duru.

  A. is rotating around an intermediate axis.

  So it’s spinning on the x-axis, flipping around to face in the opposite direction every so often.

  Jessie Chambers, Astronomical League

  What??

  Kath McKenzie, NASA

  It’s kinda like a tennis racket tumbling through the air.

  For the record, we would NEVER build a spacecraft like this.

  The tip and tail change position every half hour or so.

  Jessie Chambers, Astronomical League

  That is crazy!

  Kath McKenzie, NASA

  I know, right?

  It’s like tossing a coin to see which way is facing forward.

  Jessie Chambers, Astronomical League

  What about the braking maneuver?

  Kath McKenzie, NASA

  I hate to say it, but I think you guys are right about A.

  The more I look at this, the more a flyby of Earth and Venus makes sense.

  After Venus, it’ll loop back toward us, cruising at roughly our orbital velocity.

  If I was them, this is how I’d roll.

  Prof Alvarez, ESA

  I make contact at 4:18 UTC or 12:18 am Eastern Daylight Time.

  25o north by 77o3’ west.

  Just off the coast of Nassau.

  At an
initial altitude of 140,000 meters.

  They’ll probably dive down to somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000 meters. Any lower and they’d risk hitting some of the more unpredictable, thicker layers in our atmosphere. Too much density could ruin their deflection, so they’ll probably stay high.

  Probably.

  Jessie Chambers, Astronomical League

  And the impact energy?

  Any idea how our atmosphere will react to that much energy being liberated?

  By my calcs, this is going to be well into the hundreds of megatons.

  But it won’t be nuclear as such, right?

  Kath McKenzie, NASA

  No, but we have no parallel beyond a nuclear explosion.

  I suspect such an extremely high energy pass within the atmosphere will result in a lot of particle collisions.

  Too much excess energy in too small an area over too short a period of time.

  There’s going to be plasma production. Possibly even fusion.

  Electrons are going to be violently stripped away.

  It’s not going to be pretty.

  Prof Alvarez, ESA

  Then you’ve got secondary particle collisions.

  Jessie Chambers, Astronomical League

  And tertiary particle collisions.

  And so on and so on.

  Prof Alvarez, ESA

  So lots of cascading effects reaching down to ground level.

  Kath McKenzie, NASA

  Yes, but the whole thing will be over in roughly fifteen to twenty seconds.

  Prof Alvarez, ESA

  Damn.

  Okay, got to go and update these guys.

  Send me through any more info.

  Kath McKenzie, NASA

  Kath closes her laptop, but she struggles to switch gears and focus on the conversation within the Oval Office. The speechwriter asks her a few questions. Kath tries to answer as best she can. Her mind is reeling from the implications of An̆duru hitting the upper atmosphere at a hypervelocity. She tries to keep her comments positive, but it’s all she can do to calm her breathing and not have a panic attack.